The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘Of course I will,’ he said.

  ‘I’m so grateful. The last chap I hired to do it ran off with the money.’

  Before Mr Quinn could reply, Miss Frobisher arrived in the company of the officer Jenny had reported the green smoke to. Alongside him were two rather burly men wearing uniforms that were too small for them.

  The first officer nodded to me and said, ‘Good evening, Mr Wenlock.’ He seemed a touch disappointed to see me drinking with Mr Quinn, as if he expected better of me. ‘Please excuse the interruption. Mr Quinn, I wonder if I might have a word with you in private? Over here, perhaps.’ He pointed at a vacant booth. Mr Quinn frowned at the interruption, but stood up and walked to the booth with the officer. As I watched them I sizzled inside with nervous excitement.

  The officer spoke to Quinn and then held out the ring. Quinn’s eyes popped almost from their sockets. He looked at the ring, shot a glance to Miss Frobisher, who was standing nearby wearing an expression of icy hauteur, then he looked at me, and back at the ring. Then the penny dropped. In a rage, he strode towards me and shouted, ‘You dirty, rotten, crooked swine, Wenlock!’ Conversations around the bar stopped, as everyone looked to see where the shouting came from.

  The officer swiftly interposed himself between the two of us. ‘Now see here, Mr Quinn. I would advise you not to add calumny to your list of crimes.’

  ‘It’s Wenlock you should be arresting, he’s a bloody murderer!’

  ‘Really, sir!’ said the officer, appalled at Mr Quinn’s loutish manners. ‘I would firstly ask you not to use such language in the presence of ladies, and further advise you not to be objectionable to Mr Wenlock, whom I happen to know and admire. He is a champion fellow. We are all indebted to him for his sharp-eyed observation this morning.’

  ‘He’s a bloody lying, twisted son of a dog, that’s what he is!’ shouted Quinn. He pushed the officer aside and lunged at me. This was the cue for the two other chaps – who were tensed and ready – to play their part. They jumped forward and grabbed Quinn by both arms, pinioned them behind his back as easily as if he were a rag doll. I formed the impression that these two chaps were not really officers but stokers whose help was enlisted on occasions when chaps were disagreeable. I also got the impression they rather enjoyed the job but were anxious not to let any hint of that appear in their expressions. In this they only partially succeeded. They frogmarched Mr Quinn away and off to the ship’s brig, where I later discovered he fell instantly asleep.

  He spent the rest of the voyage locked in the brig, making so many wild accusations against me, I was told, that the Captain recommended the authorities in Singapore prepare a brain doctor to examine him. I did not get another chance to talk to Mr Flamenco, for he and Miss Connemara left the ship at Port Said. The ship tarried the better part of a day there, and I now received another fragment of the screenplay sent out from England by airmail, together with the news that Lady Seymour had arranged an interview for us in Singapore with Curtis’s business partner, a Mr Simkins.

  Jenny and I stood at the rail and watched Mr Flamenco and Miss Connemara depart in a white taxi. After it had gone we lingered for a while before moving to the starboard side to get a different view of the port, arriving at the rail in time to catch a glimpse of a freighter slowly steaming past. Lashed to the deck, aft, was the tin of Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup we had seen in Southampton.

  ‘It’s following us, Jack,’ said Jenny.

  ‘It certainly seems to be.’

  ‘Where do you think it is going?’

  ‘I really have no idea.’

  Just then Miss Frobisher joined us and informed us with barely contained excitement that she had managed to speak with Mr Flamenco before he and Solveig left. ‘He’s working on a new movie,’ she said. ‘It’s about a pirate who buys a white woman at a slave auction with the intention of sacrificing her to a giant ape! But then they fall in love.’

  INT. SLOPPY JOE’S BAR, MACASSAR. NIGHT

  The wildest seaman’s bar east of Java. A slave auction is in progress. MILLIE TOOKEY stands at the front on a dais, with her suitcase. Next to her are three MALAY LADIES. A European man wearing a white linen suit officiates. Small round tables fill the rest of the space. A host of scoundrels and rapscallions of every stripe are drinking liquor and gambling. Malay pirates, US navy sailors, Chinamen, Arabs, demi-mondaines etc.

  All eyes turn to the door as CAPTAIN SQUIDEYE enters. Handsome and fierce, like a seafaring Heathcliff, he wears a black patch over one eye and radiates an authority that causes lesser souls to quail.

  AUCTIONEER

  What am I bid for this fine English rose?

  He indicates MILLIE.

  CAPT. SQUIDEYE

  One English pound.

  CAPTAIN SQUIDEYE takes a seat at a table where a CHINESE BUSINESSMAN in a Western suit sits, seemingly about to bid.

  AUCTIONEER

  One pound! You joke!

  The CHINESE BUSINESSMAN opens his mouth to bid. CAPTAIN SQUIDEYE puts his hand over the CHINESE BUSINESSMAN’s mouth. His bid is muffled. CAPTAIN SQUIDEYE puts the barrel of a revolver to the CHINESE BUSINESSMAN’s temple. His eyes almost jump from their sockets in fear. Everyone in the room watches and understands the message.

  AUCTIONEER

  Any advance on a pound? There must be! Gentlemen please!

  The people in the room shift uncomfortably, and avoid the roving gaze of the AUCTIONEER.

  AUCTIONEER

  Very well, sold for one pound to the gentleman with the eyepatch!

  FADE OUT

  EXT. THE OCEAN. DAY

  Wide shot of SQUIDEYE’S tramp steamer sailing gently on a placid sea. Gulls wheel over the ship. The ribbon of smoke from the single funnel lies across the sky like gauze.

  EXT. DECK OF TRAMP STEAMER. DAY

  SQUIDEYE is introducing MILLIE to the crew: BIG JIM, MOWGLI, SCARFACE, JAMIE SCAB, DICKIE SILVER, BONNY. CHO LEE, a Chinaman in traditional Chinese costume and cue, holds her suitcase.

  SQUIDEYE

  And this is Mowgli, the bo’sun.

  MOWGLI

  (Makes mock-gallant bow)

  Charmed, I’m sure!

  MILLIE

  I want to go home.

  SQUIDEYE

  Home? What is that?

  MILLIE

  I want to go home to England.

  SQUIDEYE

  England! Men, hands up all those who would like to sail for England …

  (He waits for a reaction.)

  … not one?

  MOWGLI

  Captain, if we go to England they will hang us.

  SQUIDEYE

  Oh yes, I forgot. So they will. Well, my dear it looks like we can’t go to England. And besides, if we do you will miss your wedding.

  MILLIE

  I’m not getting married!

  SQUIDEYE

  Oh yes you are.

  MILLIE

  Who to?

  SQUIDEYE

  It’s a surprise.

  MILLIE

  I don’t want to get married.

  SQUIDEYE

  You have no say in the matter.

  MILLIE

  I refuse.

  SQUIDEYE

  You will do as you are told! Cho Lee, take her below to her quarters.

  Chapter 6

  In Singapore we took a taxi from the port, a cream Ford Anglia driven by an affable Chinese gentleman who spoke very good English. The weather as we crossed the Indian Ocean had grown increasingly warmer and muggy but had been partly alleviated by the perpetual breeze that merely moving through the water out at sea provides. On arrival in Singapore the breeze stopped and the sun took on the quality of a blowtorch in the sky, its effects intensified by humidity of a sort we had only ever experienced before in the Weeping Cross swimming baths.

  A rainstorm accompanied our arrival, very intense but short-lived, and the rain clouds soon passed, but the clammy atmosphere did not. The streets were busy with cars, and men in shorts and ves
ts threaded between them pushing handcarts. The air was warm as blood, and filled with a variety of unaccustomed scents, some rotten and putrescent and others sharp and sweet, laden with sugar and aniseed.

  ‘Do you think it ever snows here?’ said Jenny as we approached our hotel.

  ‘I think it rather unlikely,’ I said. ‘We are almost bang on the equator I believe.’

  ‘I will never complain about the weather again.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve heard you complain about the weather in all the time I’ve known you!’

  ‘I’m saving it all up for summer. Come June, you won’t recognise me. You’ll wish you’d never set eyes on me.’

  We had arrangements to stay at the Oranje Hotel on Stamford Road, just down the street from the Raffles, both in proximity and in price. But since we had to assume that Mr Quinn might persuade the authorities in Singapore to look into his story, we took rooms in a different hotel opposite the Oranje. After we had unpacked we took an empty suitcase across the road, checked in and left the suitcase there. We then laid a false trail by asking the desk clerk to find us a berth on the next ship to Yokohama.

  We then walked to the Raffles to find Mr Simkins. The white-shuttered hotel looked like a wedding cake. The doorman was a Sikh gentleman in a splendid suit and turban whiter than the building. He showed us to a set of rattan chairs arranged around a table inside the main building. We sat down beneath a slowly swirling fan high in the ceiling, and ordered tea from a waitress who, though Chinese, seemed dressed in a similar fashion to the girls in the Lyon’s tea shop. Our table gave us a prospect of a reception desk across a tiled floor, and to our left a courtyard garden separated from us by a low wall.

  Mr Simkins joined us after a while and ordered himself a ginger ale. He wore a cream linen suit and sighed a lot, though not I felt from the heat, but rather as a general comment on life. His hair was slicked smooth with pomade and in his eyes one saw a sadness, the melancholy of a man who has reached his middle years without adventure and misfortune and wonders perhaps whether he might have been too careful to avoid these things.

  ‘Curtis became unreliable,’ was his verdict. ‘Went off the rails. Started wearing rouge and blacking his hair. Even had it set in a permanent wave. He looked like a tin soldier. Started talking some ballyhoo about the Graf von Scharnhorst, of all people. Claimed he met him before the Great War and that the whole thing was set up by the ruling families of Europe.’

  ‘What whole thing?’ I asked.

  ‘The bloody war, of course. Don’t ask me why they would do that. I took no notice of him.’ He paused, as if a stray thought had crossed his mind, and his voice became slightly distant. ‘We make but two boat trips in our lives. The one out, and the one back. If you find out you don’t particularly like it out here, then you are in a bit of a fix. You can spend years denying it to yourself – after all the whole thing is quite irrevocable, so there isn’t a lot of point moaning about it. All the same, the truth can never be denied, can it? Sooner or later it knocks on your door, usually when you get up to visit the lavatory at four a.m. The world looks different then, there is no room for artifice. That’s when it strikes you: you only have one life to live and you’ve thrown it away.’

  ‘Is that what happened to Curtis?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘I rather think so,’ he said. He called the waitress over and ordered more tea. ‘The question that keeps me awake is this: would any of it have happened if the Japs hadn’t been such dirty swine? If they had possessed the decency to fight like honourable men perhaps things would have been different. We used to have our pictures taken once a year at Nakajima’s studio in the arcade here.’ He indicated the rough direction of the arcade with a twist of his head. ‘We all liked Nakajima, he was a good Jap. Polite, friendly, quite funny, you couldn’t not like him. That was what made the betrayal all the harder.’

  ‘What did he do?’ said Jenny.

  ‘Nakajima took our pictures, that’s what he did. Everyone who was anyone came to the Raffles. And he took their pictures and put them up in the arcade. A complete Who’s Who of the expatriate community. You have to admire the chutzpah. It was the perfect job for a spy, wasn’t it?

  ‘I’ll never forget the day the Japs turned up. The story went that they had deliberately avoided bombing the Raffles in order to use it as their Mess. I can believe it, too. They renamed it Syonan Ryokan and changed the clock to Tokyo time. General Yamashita installed himself in an entire wing, and then this bloody fellow Nakajima appears dressed as a general. Bloody scoundrel! He was quite cold about it too; all that yessir no-sir stuff was a thing of the past. We used to call him Nicky-nacky, well there was no more of that. Old Maynard said it once and got slapped in the face by him. By the damn photographer! It was like finding your wife in bed with the barber. He didn’t hit back, though, which was just as well. Heaven knows what they would have done. Nailed him to the door I shouldn’t wonder. This was at a time when they were machine-gunning the Chinese out at Changi.

  ‘And then there was a massacre on the golf course. I think that’s when we knew we were dealing with absolute beasts. The spat with Curtis started over the gun emplacements. They were on the golf course, two fifteen-inch guns, pointing right out across the Strait. We would have blown anyone in the Strait to Kingdom-come.’ He laughed. ‘We thought we were impregnable. But then the news came that the sly dogs were coming through the jungles of Malaya, through the back door. That was impossible, or so we had supposed. They rode through the jungle on bicycles. Contrary to all rules of civilised warfare. The brass hats wanted to turn the guns round, but that would have required bringing the next meeting of the Greens committee forward by six weeks. Mr Curtis was opposed to it, and quite rightly in my opinion. It would have set a terrible example. The rules and regulations were there for a purpose and oughtn’t to be messed with except in an emergency.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the need to defend the island against the Japanese have counted as an emergency?’ asked Jenny.

  Mr Simkins peered at her through half-narrowed eyes as if wondering whose side she was on.

  ‘I mean,’ she added, ‘some people might think so.’

  ‘Oh they did,’ he said. ‘We were almost evenly split, and it was only the casting vote of the Chairman that determined the outcome. The guns remained where they were. There was quite a bit of rancour and feelings were running pretty high. Curtis was quite shaken by some of the things that were said. That was the beginning. A week later the chit system was abandoned.’ He noted the questioning looks on our faces. ‘A chap used to be able to procure a drink here at the bar by writing his name on a chit of paper, and settling up later. Some good-for-nothings ran up quite a tab over the months but generally it worked well. The locals were baffled by it of course.

  ‘But then in the final weeks they abandoned the system. You had to pay for your drinks. We knew then it was only a matter of time. There was nothing for it but to stay on and dance. We sang “There’ll always be an England” till our throats were hoarse. Not like those buggers in Penang. There the locals woke up one morning to find the British had scarpered in the night. All through 1941 you couldn’t get a table without a reservation. Mr Applebaum and his band of Hungarian Emigrés carried on playing “If You Knew Susie” and “Bye Bye Blackbird” every night. The ladies still kept cards to schedule their dance partners. The blackout curtains lent the whole thing a certain … frisson of danger. We kept our pluck, that was the main thing. But Curtis really started to go downhill with the news of the sinking of the ships Prince of Wales and Repulse.’

  Mr Simkins paused as if the memory of the two lost ships was especially painful. I let my gaze rise to the ceiling in which rows of fans quietly swirled. I wondered how it must have felt for the staff forced for a while to call this most emblematic symbol of British power by a Japanese name and adopt the strange contrivance of Tokyo time.

  Our host continued. ‘And then on the morning of 7 February a rumour swept through Singapore, abou
t the silver roast beef trolley. I was out at Tanjong Pagar, but rushed back as soon as I heard. I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, but it was. I saw Curtis just after lunch. He was ashen. He wasn’t usually given to grand speeches, but he said to me then perhaps more in one sentence than he usually said in a month. His voice was quite strange. It was like the voice of an Englishman who had avoided excesses of emotion all his life and, now that his life had been utterly and irretrievably destroyed, everything he loved, cherished and worked for reduced to ash, tries to intimate that it is just an inconvenience and nothing to get worked up about. He said a group of chaps had approached him and told him the responsibility for the greatest defeat of British arms – which all knew now was unavoidable – along with the consequent total collapse of the British Empire in the East, rested on the shoulders of him and the rest of the Greens committee.’

  ‘But what was the piece of news that brought you back to the hotel?’ I said.

  He looked me directly in the eye and said, ‘The hotel management had taken the silver roast beef trolley from the Grill and buried it in the Palm Court.’ He paused to let the implications of this sink in, and added, ‘When Prince of Wales and Repulse went down, they were dark days but we could still hope. But when the silver roast beef trolley went down, there was a finality about it that really brooked no denial. I imagine the feeling would have been the same on the Titanic when you stood on deck, freezing in the winds coming from Newfoundland, and watched the last lifeboat be winched away, with still half the ship’s complement on deck. Did you ever think about that?’

  We said that we did not. For some reason I recalled a story I had heard about the hotel. It told how chaps would recline in their chairs for a nap after lunch and chalk the time they wished to be woken on the soles of their shoes. Did Curtis do that too?

  Mr Simkins flicked some imaginary fluff from the knee of his trousers. ‘Before the war Curtis was with the Colonial Service for a while. Then he came to work alongside me at Crayford & Crayford. We worked together in a small one-room office administering the smelting of tin golliwog badges in Malaya. After the war we went back to work as we had before, but nothing was ever the same again, least of all Curtis.